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Friday, January 30, 2015

Interactive Friction: Episode 9: This Is Some Magical (Bull)Shit

In this episode, we dive headlong into a vat of terrible, terrible filler. Naturally, this makes us spend almost an entire episode talking about Final Fantasy.

I want to stress that there is nothing inherently wrong with these missions in terms of gameplay. They are actually very fun to playthrough. Everyone wants to be Indiana Jones, after all.

The problem is that they just do not fit into the story. So far, Jason has been established as being someone who is willing to kill or cripple anyone who gets in the way of his friends. Every time he acts out of line in this section, Buck (and I had to Google that name) calls up his cronies and asks them to torture our friend Keith. So, Jason would probably have shot Buck stupid and forced him to lead him to Keith. It's hard to argue that Jason wouldn't, since murderous rage is the entirety of his character arc.

It's also difficult to justify how Buck didn't get the dagger by now. He works for Hoyt, the soon to-be-revealed main bad guy. It should be simple to get his men, which he apparently has if he can call them up to torture Keith, to get this dagger for him. Barring that, Hoyt has an army of disposable pirates that are fully-capable of doing the job. Really, it just shows incompetence on Buck's part.

Which is why this segment of the game feels so poorly justified. Not only does Jason not have a compelling enough reason to take this quest in lieu of more direct options, but Buck also doesn't have a compelling reason to outsource this quest to Jason. Also, remember that we needed this dagger to get Citra to help us find our friends, which we will have once we finish this quest.